The Violent Femmes of Football

They paint their faces, they grunt and swear and down Jell-O shots before 10 A.M., and they never go a Sunday without their team jerseys. They're the females of football—and no, they're not cheerleaders. Lauren Bans spends game day with one of the NFL's fastest-growing fan bases—female superfans

"Hey! HEY! Lemme get a picture!" A stumpy man in a Darren McFadden jersey, whose cheeks are glopped with two generous Rorschach blots of eye black, is shouting over to the two women next to me, Metal Cindy and Dre of the Dead. This keeps happening. It's taken us about thirty minutes to walk just sixty yards from our tailgate in the southwest corner of Lot C toward the entrance of the Oakland coliseum, home of the Oakland Raiders. And not because a crowd has formed to get inside. It's just past noon, an hour before kickoff, and there's time for one more beer before the tailgaters are required to pack up their grills. No, we're traveling at turtles-on-benzos pace because Cindy, 27, and her 17-year-old protégée, Dre, a quiet, raven-haired beauty, who, in her striped leggings and black tutu, recalls a 1990s Winona Ryder, are celebrities here. Navigating the lot with them, as I've been doing for the past four hours, is like walking around a junior high school with Justin Bieber. Only in this junior high, the kids wear spikes and chains and generally look like groupies who got tossed out of a Kiss concert for freaking out the band.

Here's a sampling of who Cindy and Dre have posed with so far this morning: three teenage girls openly smoking a pipe of weed; a pack of smallish Mexican men who speak no English; two lady police officers on bicycles; a pair of incongruously well-dressed European gentlemen; a big group of rowdy drunks; a phocomelic young man in a wheelchair; a bulldog with an eye patch; a middle-aged couple wearing Raiders jerseys and khakis who look like the parents from the movie Pleasantville; and two shy Latino teen boys, both built like vending machines, who trade Hey, fuck you's in Vito Corleone voices.

The guy in the McFadden jersey finagles himself between Cindy and Dre, his head barely rising above Cindy's toothsome cleavage, which is cinched and pushed up to her clavicle by a Raiders bustier top with maybe a thousand decorative belt buckles. Cindy is an aspiring model who's done some "very dark fetish" work for pinup calendars and music ads. She looks like a goth JWoww, or a honeypot T-800 whose face has been half blasted off to its metal core; the right side of her face is painted like Skeletor, and one of her big brown eyes is concealed by a ghoulish white Raiders contact lens. Just before the photo is snapped, McFadden guy turns and grins directly into Cindy's chest flesh, throwing a lecherous thumbs-up to the camera.

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Raider Gloria

In all of Raider nation, there are about fifty or so "superfans," and Metal Cindy and Dre of the Dead are two of them. Along with other "characters"—including Gorilla Rilla, a dude who shows up every game day in a full ape suit, plus a jersey and sunglasses over the ape suit, and who, according to Metal Cindy, got married in that getup—Cindy and Dre never miss a Sunday. They're like walking and waving Disney World mascots for the drunk-at-10-A.M. set. Hunter S. Thompson once described them as "the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and whackos ever assembled." They represent NFL obsession at its most fervent—or unhinged, depending on your viewpoint.

Which is why I've come here, of all NFL cities, to find women like Metal Cindy and Dre: because I have no earthly idea why any woman would want to be part of this scene. It's not that I hate football—I reserve that word for Nazis and tuna-fish salad—but it's safe to say I don't -particularly enjoy the game. If you say "football," I think: "pack mentality," "day drinking," "pissing on sidewalks," "brain damage," "homoerotic pile-ups," and "Dad ignoring me." Basically, rock-bottom male behavior, quintupled. I realize you're probably not on my side here. And I'm probably not being fair. But it's a gut reaction—like how you might see a gaggle of girls watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta together and think: Ugh, women.

Apparently, though, I'm in the minority when it comes to football. Because with every given Sunday, more and more women are being drawn into its cult. And the NFL has gotten wise to its big new demo: In 2010 the league launched a new ad campaign for its line of women's apparel featuring, among others, a grinning Condoleezza Rice wearing a slim-cut Browns jersey. And according to the most recent league stats, females make up 44 percent of the NFL's fan base. Most of these women, I have to assume, are just casual fans. Watch-from-the-couch-on-Sunday types. But there's a small sliver of them who freak out over football just as hard as the men. And I wanted to see how these women—football's female diehards—assimilate into such a uniquely macho culture. Especially since I've always gotten the impression that guys value the notion that football is something for them. (Case in point: "man caves.") It's as if these ladies are pledging the biggest frat in America. So what are the hazing rituals? What are the privileges of membership? And how do these women have to shape (or reshape) themselves to fit in with Phi Kappa Football?

Dre of the Dead

So I flew to Oakland, home of fans who apparently could out-weird Hunter S. Thompson, to spend game day with women who willingly get up at 4 A.M. to drink and grill and celebrate football, so that I could experience the sport through their eyes. Could it be that I, the lamest cliché of the lady football hater, am missing out on something awesome?

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The first beers were cracked hours ago. But now, at the more sensible hour of 10 A.M., my adopted crew of Raiders fans and I are summoned to the tailgate table for a "phone call." I'm standing between Metal Cindy and a tall, wiry, unsmiling guy—earlier Cindy had begged him, unsuccessfully, to let her paint his face—as a George Lucas look-alike in a Raiders hoodie explains the etymology of the term "phone call." As the story goes, one day George-Lucas-clone was standing about fifty feet from his friends' spot in the tailgate area when they decided it was time to do a shot. They didn't want to scream "Shots!" at the top of their lungs—that would be gauche—so they shouted at him, "Hey! Come here! You have a phone call!" Thus: "Phone call" = group shot.

At the count of three, we all slam back tequila—Patrón, the good stuff—out of Dixie cups. I'm looking for a place to discard my empty when, by way of introduction, a Snooki-sized older woman wearing a huge Raiders jersey as a makeshift dress, plus shoulder pads and false eyelashes, jabs her finger directly into my left breast. This is Raider Gloria.

"What is going on here? I liiiike this." She's referring to my rather unremarkable gray crewneck T-shirt, not my left breast. "Only it should go"—and now she begins to make light-saber noises ("phhhshu! phhhshu! phhhshu!") to indicate where she would make cuts in the fabric, which is basically from the neck down in a big swoop to the middle of my stomach.

Before I can respond, a man squeezes in between us and accidentally grazes Gloria's chest in what can only be some kind of karmic molestation payback. Only, Gloria is delighted. She calls out to the man's son, who's leaning on the bumper of a Ford SUV and looking bored: "Hey, take a picture of your dad touching my titties!"

One of the many Raiders female fans getting high on football.

Perched on a beer cooler, Gloria shares enough of her life story that in a matter of minutes I'm ready to watch a TV show about her. She's 64 years old, a widow of two years, and she insists that her late husband and father, who never got to meet in life, hang out together in heaven on Sundays watching the Raiders game and "throwing shit down" from the clouds when someone fumbles or commits a bonehead mistake. She was born with fantastic hair. Her dad and her godfather started taking her to Raiders games when she was 12, and she'd drive them home whenever they "got too much Hennessy in them," propped up on pillows so she could see over the steering wheel. Once, she knocked down a belligerent Broncos fan because the woman pointed a finger at her. She says "finger" as if it's obvious how offensive it was. After she shoved the lady, she ran away. Sometimes, when she's at home during the week and feeling sad, she'll put on one of the dozen or so Raiders games she has recorded, just to feel an "oomph."

Maybe it's the "phone call" working its magic, but I feel a sudden sweep of jealousy. Not of her thirsty knuckles or her grabby hands, but of the fact that Gloria loves her team so much she can use a TiVo'd football game to self-medicate, whereas it takes me two glasses of wine and a Xanax to feel the same aforementioned oomph.

During a break in Gloria's monologue, Cindy walks by, and Gloria grabs a handful of her skirt, lifts it up, takes a peek underneath, and then announces to no one in particular, "I just had to check, okay?!"

Moments later, Cindy swings through again, this time with a blond twentysomething in tow. He wants a picture with both of them. "Me?" Gloria double-checks, seeming vaguely flattered. "He wants me in it?" Yes, it's affirmed, he does. The three pose in front of an old pickup truck, kid in the middle. Just before the picture's taken, Gloria reaches over and pats the kid's crotch. "Oh, my God, look at you!" she gushes, like he's a nephew she hasn't seen in ages. An electrical fire breaks out under his cheeks. "You're hard!" Then more loudly to everyone: "He's hard!"

The women laugh. The men look horrified.

There's something about Gloria's lampoonish raunchiness that reminds me of an animal defense mechanism called Batesian mimicry. To describe it crudely, it's when the prey tries to out-crazy the predator to get it to back off. It comes to mind because, at times, Gloria behaves as if she has something to prove here, as though she's calculating in her head: If I'm the grossest guy of the bunch, I won't be a target.

Metal Cindy wakes up before dawn to paint on this face.

Nearby a few of the guys are vehemently discussing the defensive line of the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Raiders' opponent today. Their voices grow louder despite the fact that they're all in total agreement: The Jags' defensive line is terrible. Nodding toward the dudes, I ask Gloria and Cindy, "Do you feel like you can talk football with the guys?"

"We know everything they know and more!" Gloria shouts, matching the volume of the Jaguars shit-talkers. "Like, how many points does a touchdown score?" she asks, throwing out what she assumes is a softball.

I obviously have no idea. Cindy jumps in: "Seven!"

"No, six!" Cindy corrects herself. "Six! I was adding the field goal."

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By 11:30 A.M., every man, woman, and more than a few children are buzzed. And all the ceaseless picture-taking has turned into its own little sideshow. Fans keep trickling over, hoping to score a quick shot with Cindy and Dre. GQ's photographer is here, too, snapping away. Another gussied-up character, a woman named Rhinestone Raider, has also wandered over and is casually trying to get in on the photo action. Rhinestone is a middle-aged blonde with blown-out pageant-queen hair, and she's shivering slightly in her black miniskirt, pink lace tights, and sleeveless halter top bedazzled with pink rhinestones. "I'm not cold!" Rhinestone protests, when she's offered a blanket. "I've got something to keep me warm!" she says, waving her travel mug filled with Captain and Coke.

Some of the men are starting to get annoyed by all the showboating. One of the regular tailgaters gives me a slow shake of his head. I'm not sure what's drawn his disapproval—Rhinestone powdering her nose in the side mirror of a truck or Cindy posing pursed-lipped with three cute girls in Raiders tanks. "Some people here," he murmurs, "are just in it for the wrong reasons." He lets that sit with me for a moment, and then he walks away.

To him, presumably, the right reason is the game. The players, the scoring, the hard hits. Most of all: the wins. I bet if I asked him, he'd tell me stories about Kenny Stabler and Marcus Allen and Al Davis and "Just win, baby." (I had to look all that up, by the way.)

The women? Sure, they want a Super Bowl trophy, too. But they don't need it as much. For them, that's not what this is all about. From what I can surmise, a major reason they get up early and put all that time into their face paint and shove their cleavage up to the base of their neck is because, well, they get attention for it. That may sound unflattering, but it also makes sense—who wouldn't want to be the queen of some kingdom, somewhere? To go from struggling model to bona fide celebrity, just by showing up and caring enough? Of course there are age-old customs that must be upheld. The carefree raucousness of game day must be respected. So if the men paint skulls on their cheeks, the women do, too. If the men yell and swear and let loose the occasional nonchalant fart, the women laugh. Or toot in tandem.

That's not to say their love of football is a sham. These women love it as much as the men—they just love it a little differently. It's hard to describe exactly how without sounding like a Successories poster: It's about the journey, not the destination. Their love is as much about the community they've built around the stadium as what happens on the field. One woman I met during a separate trip to New Orleans to hang out with Saints fans had thrown her heart and soul into rooting for a career backup named Junior Galette—a guy who's on the field for barely half the defensive snaps per game—because he's had a rough life and she wants him to know "someone out there is thinking of him." And is that such a terrible thing? Caring about the people rather than just the outcome? Because, let's be honest, men of the southwest corner of Lot C: The Raiders usually lose. Joy must be found elsewhere.

After Rhinestone Raider finishes touching up her makeup, I ask her what she does when the football season is over.

"I cry," she says. Behind her, two teenage boys lift up their shirts and charge into each other, slamming their bellies Sumo-style. "I'm serious," she says. "I cry for days."

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